[Metakit] Starting work on a Java version of Metakit

[Bruce A.Johnson]

Hi Gary,

I appreciate your comments and have no interest in a "best language"  
war as well.  There are certainly many others that are quite interested  
in that and we can leave it to them.

I guess my bottom line is that for me Java works very well.  I do write  
compute intensive applications, often using the Colt library (  
http://dsd.lbl.gov/~hoschek/colt/ ) and for my applications I find the  
performance very good.  There are certainly circumstances where  
performance can suffer, but generally find that for my use these do not  
outweigh the benefits I find in using Java.

cheers,

Bruce


On May 12, 2005, at 12:00 PM, gary.h.merrill at gsk.com wrote:

>
> Just a couple of comments that you can take for whatever they are  
> worth, and not intended to start a "best language" war:
>
> I can well imagine that relatively direct Java access to Metakit  
> databases would be welcomed by a significant number of Java  
> developers.  I encourage this effort.  There is more than a small  
> possibility that we may need to implement some applications in Java,  
> and I would be very happy to be able to use Metakit in that event.  
>  Java has its place, and it is a very large place in web environments  
> and web-delivered applications.
>
> However, in my experience, for seriously compute-intensive  
> applications or for applications requiring computing over substantial  
> amounts of data, it is not the implementation path of choice.  
>  Performance is seriously lacking.  I could give a few examples, but  
> (again in my experience with both internally developed applications  
> and with some very good commercial applications implemented as native  
> Java apps), this can be a serious show-stopper.
>
> To characterize Java performance as "really very good" is, of course,  
> a relative characterization.  It is very often "good enough" for its  
> intended use, and it is very often good enough that a user of a  
> particular app wouldn't notice the difference if it were reimplemented  
> in C.  But for other applications, this will not be the case.  I  
> assure you, it will not.
>
> Your observation that many Metakit uses are via a scripting interface  
> is correct but, in this context, not compelling .  It is not the speed  
> of the *interfaces* that is the issue since very little time is spent  
> in the interface code.  Even then (in the most common case for Python,  
> for example) the underlying GUI code (in such packages as wxWidgets  
> and PyQT) or database code (BSDDB or Metakit) is in C or C++.  So this  
> really doesn't suggest anything about the usability of a Java  
> implementation.  The whole idea of building these applications in  
> scripting languages is to use that as a relatively thin layer to take  
> advantage of the high-performance libraries that are used under the  
> covers.  You would lose this with a pure Java implementation.
>
> I've recently seen a beautifully designed and implemented system for  
> interactive gene expression analysis written by a colleague.  He loves  
> Java -- for GUI purposes.  The GUI is implemented in C# (which I take  
> to be the (im)moral equivalent of Java), but all the work (statistical  
> analysis, processing of data, graphing, etc.) is done in C.  He said  
> he would not have even attempted to do that in Java since the  
> performance of the resulting system would have rendered it unusable.  
>  My concern is that a pure Java implementation of Metakit would have  
> the same result -- and that would be a shame because it would limit  
> its usability and use.  It just looks to me as though there is too  
> much to lose and nothing obvious to gain.
>
>
> <unknown.jpg><mime- 
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>
Bruce A. Johnson, President
One Moon Scientific, Inc.
839 Grant Ave.
Westfield, NJ 07090

Phone 908 517-5105
Fax      908 517-5107
Email  bruce at onemoonscientific.com
Web    www.onemoonscientific.com
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